Resume - Career in a few words

Being a recruiter by profession, I read a few hundred resumes every day. It almost takes 1-2 minutes max on each resume. Yep, you read that right!! According a study, recruiters spend only 6 seconds to read a resume on average. And that’s all the time you’ve got to impress the reader so your resume doesn’t end up in the “rejected” pile.

While the recruiter might only have a few positions to fill in, its extremely hard to find the right fit in most cases. Reasons could be various. But for each position, few hundred resumes get scanned and shortlisted and only a few get to the interview stage. Having spent a lot of time scanning through resumes, I’d let out a few secrets and tips from the recruiter’s point of view.

Length: 2 pages max. That’s all. Nothing more than that. Even better if you can make it a 1-page resume. In rare occasions, where one might be talking about research papers, publications or having extensive experience, a 3-page resume is acceptable.

Colors: Refrain from adding colors/colored text. Its annoying. Believe me.

Fonts and Font Sizes: Make sure the resume is written in one font. Maintain one size for headings (size:14) and one size for the remaining text (size: 12). Although your name, email and phone number at the top could be the biggest font size(:16) on the resume.

Experience: Start off with your latest experience at the top. What you are doing right now is more important than knowing how you started and scrolling through painfully to know your current status. List a maximum of 10-15 years of your experience. That should be sufficient.

Titles & Companies: Make sure your title and the company name you’ve worked with is standing out. If you’ve had multiple roles with the same company, you could just mention the company name at top one and talk about your responsibilities under each title. It’s also advisable to add the dates/years with each company.

Address: When emails were not widely used, address on the resume was very helpful. I don’t see a need to mention the address on the resume anymore. It’s also dangerous, who knows who might end up stalking you?

Hobbies: It might be good to mention hobbies that are related to your profession, like hackathons for software dev. But hobbies like ‘listening to music’, ‘donating blood’, ‘cooking’, etc. Really? A hobby that doesn’t add value to the company is not required on the resume. Keep in mind the little space you have.

Email ID: Have an email with your name, like Rebecca.Dsouza@gmail.com Avoid using pet names. honeybunny@xxxx.com cuteboy@xxxx.com These are very unprofessional.

A young man’s email was lawyer*NAME*@gmail.com and he was applying for a software engineer role :) These are worth to be laughed at but definitely unimpressive.

Well I think I've covered the basic topics on a resume. But feel free to let me know if I should be adding anything else.